Category Archives: New Mexico

One of my very first ‘real’ jobs was working at Hustler Press, owned by Orval Ricketts. I was a senior in high school in Farmington, New Mexico and Mr. Ricketts was one of the finest men I’ve ever met.

The memories . . .

The goodbyes and the hellos . . .

Mr. Ricketts’ poem, “Looking at Another Year” is in his book of poetry, My Window on the Mesa.

For many who came during the Dust Bowl years, Pie Town was intended only as a stopover on the way to California. Mrs. Lewis West with her father and mother headed west on U.S. 60 in 1935. Five of their chickens suffocated in the Texas dust the morning they left. On their first night in Pie Town, ten more chickens died of mountain cold. her father was ill with heart trouble, so he and his wife and five children settled into a half-dugout and began to raise pinto beans and maize for cornmeal.

For hopeful immigrants from the choking Dust Bowl areas of Texas and Oklahoma, the reality of homesteading on the Zuni Plateau failed to live up to their drams. The Pie Town area was unpromising for farming. The mountains were wooded, and the rolling valleys were covered with thick rabbitbrush, or chamisa, that made hand-clearing the land a tedious and back-breaking job. The growing season was usually too short with light frosts in early June and again in mid-September. Moisture was unreliable. Some years, when there was enough rain and snow, homesteaders might grow fine vegetable gardens and enough pinto beans or corn to sell for the necessities they could not grow themselves. Other years, the moisture was inadequate, and the rabbits, elk, or grasshoppers ate most of what was planted. Many homesteaders gave up and moved on to the cities where they joined the unemployment lines. By the 1940s, when Russell Lee arrived to take his photographs for the FSA, the community had already declined from its 1935 peak to about two hundred families.

Mr. and Mrs. Jack Whinery and their five children in their dugout. Pie Town, New Mexico. Mr. Whinery had worked on farms in Texas for wages until homesteading one year ago. He arrived in Pie Town with thirty cents which he spent for nails to build his dugout. He donates his services as a preacher to the church. [Library of Congress photographs]

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Throw off the bowlines

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
Mark Twain

life is this simple

Life is this simple.

Life is this simple.
We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent
and God is shining through it all the time.
This is not just a fable or a nice story
It is true.
If we abandon ourselves to God
and forget ourselves,
we see it sometimes
and we see it maybe frequently.
God shows Godself everywhere,
In everything,
In people and in things and in nature and in events.
It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and
in everything and we cannot be without God.
It is impossible.
The only thing is that we don't see it.
- Thomas Merton